Today, Americans understand that a bamboo man-trap is every bit as lethal as a grenade. But a scant 20 years ago, a global war was in progress and unconventional warfare was in the minds of many, a rather nasty—possibly unnecessary—business. An almost indestructible Navy captain did much to dispel this misconception.
A Million Dollars—Dead or Alive. Leaflets announcing this reward were tacked to trees in Hong Kong and Rangoon. They were dropped among the shuffling masses on the streets of Saigon and Shanghai. They were posted on the walls of mud huts in the Gobi and bamboo bashas in Burma, on the masts of junks in the China Sea from Manchuria to Malaya—any place throughout Asia where the wanted men might be.
Bribes were offered to officials, to police, and underworld characters to spread the word that these men were sworn enemies of the New Asia which would emerge when the war ended, and that it was a public duty to bring them to justice. Special agents were assigned to track them down.
The hunters were the Japanese Army and Chinese Communist forces. The hunted were Lieutenant General Tai Li, chief of Nationalist China's secret police, and his Yankee deputy, NavyCaptain (later Vice Admiral, Retired) Milton E. Miles, the first director of the Far Eastern Branch of OSS and co-founder of SACO, the Sino-American Co-operative Organization. Between them, with a hundred thousand guerrillas, twenty-five thousand pirates, and three thousand American technicians and instructors, the Chinese general and the American captain were giving the Japanese and Chinese Communists a rough time. Along with General Claire Chennault, they headed the list of those condemned to death by Tojo and Mao Tse-tung.
The number of times Tai's enemies tried to capture or kill him is unknown. He cheated death so many times that a legend of invulnerability clung to his name.
There were five attempts to liquidate Captain Miles. One was made on a lonely, unlighted railway platform at Allahabad, India, in 1942. Two deep knife gashes almost finished him, but he fought off his assailant and forced him to flee. In 1943, Miles was strafed by a Japanese aircraft. One of his legs was splattered with shrapnel. In 1944, Japanese machine gun bullets riddled his car. On another occasion the same year, a Communist agent, posing as a servant, dumped a sack of live ammunition into a charcoal brazier in front of which he was seated. Bullets went in all directions. Shortly before World War II ended, two armed Japanese and a Communist were caught trying to enter the room in which he was sleeping.
Japanese patrols chased him along rice paddy trails, over mountains and up and down the China coast. The Communists tried to corner him in a temple in northwest China, in a sampan on the Yangtze River, and on a peninsula jutting into the China Sea. But Miles eluded capture for almost four years.
Captain Miles had other worries besides the Japanese and the Chinese Communists. Not all Americans saw the value of his unconventional operations; in fact, some of his countrymen belittled his efforts and tried to thwart his mission and ultimately have him and his American sailors and marines removed from the Orient. Lieutenant General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, commander of the China-Burma-India theater of operations, and his successor, Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, were in this group. They controlled the flow of arms, ammunition, and other military supplies over the Himalayan Hump by Army aircraft.
General Stilwell told Miles bluntly: "I like you, but not your job. 1 won't hinder you, but I won't help you." General Wedemeyer, despite Joint Chiefs of Staff authorization to do otherwise, restricted the much needed logistics support for Miles's and Tai's people to a pitiful, 150-ton airlift; in 1945, Wedemeyer cut off all support for six months.
Brigadier General William J. Donovan, chief of OSS, after using Miles and his work with Tai to get a foothold in China for his super-spy organization, fired Miles as director of the Far Eastern branch—less than a year after his appointment—because Tai refused to implement Donovan's policies and plans. Afterwards, although still using Tai's intelligence service, his facilities, and the protection of his OSS agents, General Donovan spread distrust of Tai in Washington. This caused certain senior assistants to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Chief of Naval Operations Ernest J. King to question the wisdom of the Navy's operations in China. However, two investigative groups sent to check on Miles's usefulness became ardent boosters and brought back glowing reports of his achievements.
In addition to military and OSS opposition, Miles also encountered trouble with State and Treasury Department officials in Chungking. They sent disparaging reports to their superiors in Washington, deploring the way. Far Eastern naval operations were being conducted.
Miles's American critics were no less dedicated than was Miles himself. And while it is true that their actions hampered his operations, it is also evident that the thorn in their side was not Miles, but rather his association with the notorious Tai. Miles's detractors did not believe their country or its armed forces should team up with a man of such international disrepute.
Tai gained his reputation mostly from his work as head of the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (BIS), China's secret police. He organized it in 1932 and directed it until his death. BIS planted operatives throughout Asia, both in front of and behind Japanese lines. It kept watch on foreigners as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Communists. Its eyes were flower girls, coolies, and ricksha men. It reported to Tai with invisible ink messages and built up the nucleus of an effective guerrilla army and private navy.
In 1940, Tai established two new sections to his then sprawling secret police force—one which handled smuggling and counter-smuggling, and another which procured government supplies.
His smugglers stole automobile tires, explosives, and supplies made in Japan and delivered them across enemy lines into Free China. The counter-smugglers stopped the Japanese from getting supplies out of Free China into occupied territory. The functions of both groups were to hide valuable supplies so that the Japanese could not confiscate them, blow up Japanese trucks on the highways, their junks and sampans on the waterways, and to burn their warehouses.
The bulk of Tai's military supplies, during 1942-45, were procured through Miles. By the SACO Agreement, signed by the United States and Nationalist China, the Navyfurnished all material and supplies needed by Tai's guerrillas and pirates. In return, SACO got housing, staging areas, and the freedom to carry out its operations in Asia.
The Navy contingent within SACO had three important jobs to do. One was to lay mines and harass Japanese shipping along the China coast, on the vital inland waterways, and in the harbors of Formosa. Another was to gather intelligence on Japanese shipping, as well as to find out what defenses the enemy was setting up against American invasion. Still another—by far the most important—was the collection of weather information for the Pacific Fleet.
Meteorologists had proved that weather data could mean the difference between winning and losing a battle. Bomber flights could be timed to be hidden by cloud banks, and airplanes could be flown overroutes where tail winds would givethem the biggest boost. China was of particular importance to the Navyweather information, because reports from that country were the only means of offsetting the advantage to Japan of her weather stations at home, in Manchuria, in China, and far to the South. The Japanese knew what the next day's flying conditions would be. Off to the east, the Pacific Fleet was blind on weather. Any sustained, large-scale, American offensive in the Western Pacific would be difficult until a mission to China could feed weather information to the Fleet.
When Miles arrived in Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek assigned Tai, his most trusted lieutenant, to the job of implementing the Navy'splans. Tai's guerrilla army, his aides said, could protect the technicians sent to man the weather stations, harass the enemy, and sabotage his installations. His pirates could mine the harbors and rivers, make photographic reconnaissance trips along the coast, and help Miles determine where America's invasion beachhead should be. His spies could gather intelligence. His organization was tailor-made for Miles's requirements.
In May 1942, just two weeks after Miles had landed at Chungking and established his headquarters there, Tai took him on a trip behind Japanese lines, where Miles freely questioned the agents and guerrilla officers who came to report. He was convinced by what he saw that, contrary to what he had heard, Tai was a worthwhile team-mate.
Then Miles reported the results of his investigation, the Navy began sending men and equipment by air and sea to India, thence over the dangerous Hump to China.
The organization soon began to expand. By the summer of 1943, it extended the length of China. In addition to the Chungking headquarters, a trans-shipping station was maintained at Kunming. In remote spots were weather stations, intelligence units, miningand sabotage teams, and two guerrilla training camps.
Miles had learned the night fighting tactics of guerrilla warfare. He had slept on wet and frozen ground, in vermin-ridden huts surrounded by squealing pigs and whimpering children. He had hiked up to 120 li—40 miles—a day over mountainous roads or dusty plains, subsisted on a single bowl of rice topped with fried vegetables. He had been baked in the sun of southeastern China and half frozen in the Arctic blasts of the Gobi. From all of this emerged one salient, irrefutable lesson: you had to have absolute confidence in your ally—and he in you. Your life was in his hands. It was his country. He knew it. If the chips were down, he could leave you, fade into the countryside and become just another one of the millions who looked exactly like him.
By the spring of 1944, seven more training camps were in effective operation. From these camps, raids were made regularly on railways, overland and inland water routes, and Japanese and Communist military installations. A cavalry unit, mounting bazookas on the backs of Mongolian ponies, was functioning in the Gobi Desert. Twenty coast-watching teams kept all shipping between Manchuria and Malaya under surveillance. Seventy weather stations, stretching from the Gobi to Indochina in one direction, and from the Himalayas to the China Sea in the other, were sending in reports thrice daily. At headquarters, a tight little kingdom 11 miles north of Chungking where every entrance and crosspath was guarded by Tai's ready-fingered sentinels, these reports were analyzed. Weather forecasts, covering from the China coast to 500 miles into the Pacific, were transmitted daily to task forces and bases. Commander Submarines, Pacific, was notified of convoys and other seaborne traffic.
In SACO, all rank insignia was abolished. Sailors and Marines, traditionally known for their spotless uniforms, rating badges, and chevrons, wore summer and winter GI field clothing, open at the neck, often covered by a quilted Chinese windbreaker. They took atabrine to yellow their skins and perfected the ball-and-heel pace of the coolie, with yo-yo poles slung over their shoulders. When operating with the guerrillas and pirates, they dressed in Chinese gowns and wore big straw coolie hats to avoid recognition. They ate their food with chopsticks. Tea and native wine replaced unobtainable coffee and beer. They grew beards to protect their faces from the sub-zero winds. They realized that guerrilla warfare is different and that orthodox methods and discipline will not work with it.
After a few months, a guerrilla, whether he be American or foreign, becomes a primitive, elemental man. Rats fighting for their lives in a corner do not consider anything but escape from danger. Neither do guerrillas. Democracy with a capital D has to be the watchword. Nothing a guerrilla cannot have should be given to the military forces with which the guerrilla is working.
Miles's methods and his organization succeeded. The entire coast between Shanghai and Hong Kong was photographed, sounded, and charted for possible invasion landings. Thousands of Japanese were killed, wounded, or captured. Seventy-six allied fliers were rescued. Two hundred nine bridges, 75 trucks, 84 locomotives, 141 ships and rivercraft, and 97 depots and warehouses were destroyed.
Tai met every commitment to Miles and the Navy. Notable among his many kept promises was his protection of Miles's men. Out of 3,000 sailors and Marines sent to China, none suffered an enemy bullet wound and all but five returned unscathed to the United States at the end of the war.
Japan's million-dollar reward for Tai expired with the surrender of its army in 1945. The Communists cancelled theirs in March, 1946, when Tai was killed in an air crash. Chiang Kai-shek buried his lieutenant at Nanking, near the tomb of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, with full pomp and ceremony. The Communists destroyed the grave when they forced Chiang to flee to Formosa.
Both rewards for Miles lapsed when he was brought home on a stretcher at the end of the war. Although only 46 years old, he had been sapped by the rigorous life he led in China, and he was never a completely well man again. He died in March 1961, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Commander Stratton enlisted in the Navy in 1917 and retired in 1948. During World War II, he served in both the European and Pacific theatres. As a result of his experiences on the Staff of Commander, U. S. Naval Group China in 1944-1945, he wrote a history of the Navy's participation in guerrilla underground warfare published in 1950. He was recalled to active duty in 1951 to conduct a study of the German and British naval supply systems. He has written two books, several articles for service publications, and many magazine articles.